So we have an old computer lying around and I wanna put it to good use. It’s an Apple laptop from like 2016. I don’t have the money for a VPS as I have no job, I’ve had trouble with cards in the past, and I only have a few dollars on my gift cards. I was thinking I could use just the computer and have it run 24/7 despite being inefficient, potentially, but what about hosting it on my own network and the CSAM/weird content issues that I have to face?
It’s not that inneficient, but you still need a way to get a public IP. I know they are free services for it. Look at tailscale maybe?
Thanks! That’s what I’m using!
Haha I love how this has progressed, from ‘What free VPS?’ then ‘Free VPS doesn’t work’ and now we’re at ‘What can I do without a VPS?’.
Anyway, I was self hosting from home well before I started playing with VPSs, so it’s a good way to get started before having to spend money. And I still self host most of my infrastructure just because I prefer upfront costs to subscriptions.
Edit: I meant to add if you don’t have a publicly routable IP or don’t want to port forward, you can use something like Cloudflare Tunnels to proxy everything through their servers.
- Why do you want your own Lemmy instance? Can’t you just create a community on another instance?
- May not be the answer you want, consider exposing your laptop’s service(s) via Cloudflare Tunnels. That’s the best way if you don’t have an exposable public IP.
- Lemmy and other services will make outbound requests and leak your residential IP. If this is a problem for you, you should proxy outbound traffic on the machine
- Have you considered Oracle but in another region? Or do they geo-restrict you?
- For questionable content, look onto moderation tooling for Lemmy. Keep watch on your media folder(s) regularly and delete offensive ones
Hosting does not attract CSAM on its own. Anonymous uploads do. Only host services that you find useful yourself, and maybe sharing it with friends, and that’s a reasonably safe start.
Tusen takk, kompis! I wanna run a Lemmy server, do you think I can still do it with just a bare computer and no VPS?
I don’t have experience with hosting lemmy specifically, but from what I hear it doesn’t require much other than being a bit RAM-hungry. Add some swap space, use the instance primarily for yourself, and you should be good.
Thanks!!!
You can. By it will be easier if you have a static IP.
What is going on with you? Anyway, if you want to try self-hosting on a VPS, make an account on lowendspirit.com and hang out there for a while. There are lots of offers for free or ridiculously cheap VPS there. Like this starts at 25 cents per month ($3 per year):
Open a thread there saying what you’re trying to do, and ask for hosting and for technical help if you need that.
Just start with what is available to you. But first sort your aims.
Do you wanna learn or do you want to simply have services available?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material IP Internet Protocol VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #190 for this comm, first seen 24th Mar 2026, 21:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
